The Age of Leisure Railways: The Making of a Nation

FAINT RACING COMMENTARY

On 30th April 1851,

a huge crowd came from far and wide

to this racecourse in the northwest of England to watch the Chester Cup.

2/1, the favourite.

It was the railways that made such large gatherings possible.

Thousands of racegoers travelled on special excursion trains,

sending the Cup's attendance rate soaring.

The expanding transport network was at the heart of a modern,

powerful Britain, bursting with energy and confidence.

Railways were transforming our world from the 1800s

and well into the 20th century,

from where we work and what we eat, to how we spend our leisure time.

TRAIN WHISTLE

Thanks to the railways, horse racing's Chester Cup

became established as a great sporting holiday,

a time for fun and escape.

As the era of steam gathered pace,

the summer of 1851 would prove to be a watershed moment

in the history of our nation,

and for a new and exciting age of leisure.

TRAIN WHISTLE

Today, most of us take rail travel for granted.

We use trains for easy getaways and staycation breaks,

for everything from sporting events to music festivals.

Before the railways, it was a different story.

For one thing, travelling around the country was a very slow business.

Only royalty and the moneyed classes could afford

the time and expense of going on holiday.

For the average factory worker

toiling 12 or 13 hours a day, six days a week,

the very idea of frolicking about on a beach

would have seemed completely pie in the sky.

Many had never even seen the sea.

With the opening of the pioneering Liverpool

and Manchester Railway in 1830, everything changed.

Almost immediately, the railway began carrying sightseers.

They came to look in appreciation

at the world's earliest major railway viaduct

here in Sankey, midway between Liverpool and Manchester.

The cost of travelling along this architectural wonder

was the pricey sum of five shillings per passenger.

At the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester,

a replica of a locomotive built for that route

is still in regular use for the benefit of visitors.

TRAIN WHISTLE

The Planet was designed and built by Robert Stevenson.

The Sankey sightseers were in the vanguard of what was about

to become a leisure revolution.

The railways eventually would offer immense freedom and opportunity

to many of the nation's ordinary working men and women.

But back in 1830, passengers departing from here,

the booking hall of the brand-new Liverpool and Manchester Railway,

would have been slightly sceptical.

A scepticism born from the fact that these new trains

had been designed with freight in mind,

rather than passengers and luggage.

Originally, the railway companies thought that carrying goods,

in particular, coal and minerals and the like,

would be the best way of making a profit.

But they soon realised that, actually, there was fantastic demand

for passengers to travel by rail.

And that was because people couldn't really get about before

without the railways.

So the railways offered them maybe the first opportunity

of visiting the local market town, or visiting relatives

in distant parts of the country and the like.

And so it really opened up England

in a way that had never happened before.

This widening of travel opportunities

across the social classes wasn't welcomed by all.

There is this fundamental contradiction between

the idea of opening up places and people being worried

that, really, the hoi polloi

are going to be coming and spoiling the view.

Indeed, the upper echelons of early Victorian society

were suspicious of the very idea of leisure time for the masses.

They feared that inactivity

could lead to social and political disorder,

and the middle classes felt a moral duty

to educate the working masses about self-improvement.

Spare time, they believed, had its dangers.

Nearly a century before the state began to provide free education,

rail companies were offering Sunday schoolchildren

from local mills excursions.

Trips that could be fun, but had to have a moral purpose.

In the middle of the 19th century,

there was a lot of feeling amongst middle-class people

that the working classes needed to be protected

from the sort of things that they got up to,

such as gambling, racing, beer shops.

So this is an area where railway excursions came in.

And it was a kind of moral reform.

Excursions soon became a national pastime

and would quickly become big business.

Perhaps the most famous of those early excursion entrepreneurs

was Thomas Cook,

who started by organising trains to temperance meetings

in the early 1840s.

But despite Cook's enduring legacy, he was not alone.

When people talk about railway excursions,

the name that usually comes to mind is Thomas Cook.

He features in all the railway history books.

But there were other people operating at the same time

that were much more important to the ordinary person.

And one of the most important in his day

was a chappie called Henry Marcus, who was Liverpool-based,

who was contracted with the London and North Western Railway.

And he... By the time he'd finished,

he'd carried 1.5 million passengers on his excursions.

And yet, unfortunately, nobody has ever heard of him

because he finished in 1869,

he was, generally speaking, a one-man business,

and he didn't leave any records, so nobody knows about him,

apart from what you can find in newspaper advertisements.

Excursions that were morally-improving

were very important to early railway revenues.

But catering to people's vices was just as important

as catering to their virtues.

Trips to the horse races

were an important source of early railway revenue.

And the railways boosted the number of spectators

at venues like Chester Racecourse

throughout the 1800s and well into the 20th century.

The railways transformed the sport of horse racing

because horses could be taken by train straight to the meet,

being fresh and race-ready.

Top jockeys could travel around the country to ride at different meetings.

And it helped to build up a nationwide programme of events.

Racecourses at places like Newbury, Cheltenham and Aintree

would eventually have their own stations.

The station at Epsom Downs, home of the Derby,

would end up with nine platforms,

designed to cope with the massive influx of trains on race days.

As well as horse racing, another of the first spectator sports

to be helped by the railways was prize-fighting.

It's amazing to think that large crowds travelled around the country

to watch bare-knuckle fights,

laying bets on men beating each other to a bloody pulp.

Prize fights were actually illegal, bare-knuckle boxing.

So the organisers would hold the event

probably on the boundary between two different counties,

so you didn't know which police force was in charge.

And all the people would arrive,

the supporters of one prize-fight on one train

and another prize-fighter on the other train.

They would hold the event in a field nearby.

And then, after the event,

they'd get back on their respective trains and go away again.

It was treated as being a dubious enterprise

and frowned on, even at the time.

Later, in 1868, Parliament ended up banning railway companies

from running prize-fight specials.

Sport was one thing,

but the Victorians also used the new rail network

to attend fashionable events that involved spectators.

Sometimes with a macabre twist.

Public executions had always drawn crowds

and now special execution trains were laid on for willing spectators.

This quiet park in Liverpool was once the site of Kirkdale Jail.

And on execution days, they would hang people

on the scaffolding in full view of the public.

On 12th September, 1863,

excursion trains brought thousands upon thousands of people

to jostle for the best view to see Jose Maria Alvarez,

John Hughes, James O'Brien

and Benjamin Thomas hang for murder.

A correspondent from the Liverpool Mercury reported,

"Never before was seen such a mass of people at an execution at Kirkdale.

"At 11:45, there were over 100,000 persons on the ground.

"And this number was increased by large arrivals of excursionists

"from Huddersfield and Blackburn.

"Up to the last moment, too.

"The rush of people from Liverpool was something extraordinary."

Shortly after midday,

the four convicted murderers were dispatched simultaneously.

And the well-behaved, if morbid crowd

simply dispersed and went home.

Five years later, Parliament ordered that, in future,

no executions would take place outside prisons.

In the 1840s, the railway excursion business really took off.

Modern West Coast Main Line trains

can carry 600 passengers in 11 coaches

for the two-hour journey it takes from Manchester to London.

But at the start of the railway age, they went for something bigger.

Much bigger.

This was the era of the monster trains,

which were every bit as massive as their nickname suggests.

In 1844, an excursion from Leeds to Hull

reportedly took 7,800 day-trippers

in 250 carriages pulled by ten locomotives.

Millions of people were catching the railway bug,

leading to an era of true mass transportation.

And it was good news for Britain's picturesque towns,

many of which were on the coast.

They could throw themselves open to business.

The seaside holiday had arrived.

It was born here - Fleetwood,

a resort on the Lancashire coast

that was created because of the railways.

The land, initially no more than a series of sand dunes,

was transformed into a new town and seaport

designed to cater for this new era of tourism.

In 1840, the first passengers arrived in search of sun,

sea and sand along the Preston and Wyre Joint Railway.

Dick Gillingham is a local historian with the Fleetwood Museum.

This was the first place from the Lancashire workers'

point of view which they could reach by train.

Just six years later, the railway reached Blackpool and Lytham,

and then in years beyond that, other resorts were reached by the railway.

And how many people were the townspeople originally expecting to turn up?

They were expecting a very limited number of passengers.

Just 20,000 passengers for the year, probably.

And in fact, 20,000 came in the first month.

And in the first year of operation,

the first summer season, if you like,

over 100,000 people came on the train.

A terrific number for a town which, at the time,

only had a population of 2,500.

So it was a huge boost to the trade of the town.

And for somebody coming from a smoky, industrial town,

somewhere like Chorley or Bolton or Preston, arriving here,

what would that experience have been like?

Well, when they got off the train,

it was just a short walk to the beach,

obviously, the terrific vista in front of them.

The Lakeland Hills, magnificent views.

It was an awe-inspiring thing to look out there

and wonder where it all ended, really.

In the 1840s, the seaside holiday business,

previously the preserve of the rich, embraced the mass market.

Many of those travelling would have done so down this very line,

now known as the East Lancashire Heritage Railway.

In the 19th century, the line provided vital links

between the industrial towns of the North

and the nation's favourite coastal getaways.

Different seaside resorts attracted different clientele.

Blackpool became a mecca for Lancashire's working classes,

whilst Southport appealed to the slightly better-off customer.

Morecambe served the West Riding textile towns

and became known as Bradford-by-the-sea.

The new rail connections were making beach holidays possible all over the country,

from Weston-Super-Mare to Scarborough,

Eastbourne to Torquay, Bournemouth to Skegness.

TRAIN WHISTLE

Beaches will always attract holiday-makers,

but in industrial Victorian Britain,

there was one more simple healthy attraction

that was now easy to reach - clean air.

The Lake District had already been attracting

well-heeled visitors and artists,

drawn to its dramatic landscapes.

William Wordsworth, one of our great Romantic poets

and a native of the Lakes,

had written a guidebook which was proving popular.

His famous poem, I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud,

was inspired by the sight of daffodils

on the shores of Ullswater.

Many others now wanted to sample the same air

and increase their contact with nature.

The railways made that possible.

The Furness Railway, now known as the Lakeside and Haverthwaite Heritage Railway,

was historically used for moving coal and iron ore.

But it was tourists who were increasingly being brought into the Lakes by rail.

But Wordsworth was horrified by the prospect of trainloads

of working-class people descending upon his beloved Lakes.

As a new line was proposed between Kendall and Windermere,

Wordsworth launched a campaign against it.

He believed that bringing in uncultured travellers

would destroy the beauty of the places they'd come to enjoy.

For Wordsworth, these were the wrong sort of tourists.

"As for holiday pastimes," he wrote,

"if a scene is to be chosen suitable to them

"for persons thronging from a distance,

"it may be found elsewhere at less cost of every kind."

Wordsworth's campaign failed and the line opened in 1847.

But one of the ironies surrounding the poet

was that while he was against tourism,

he himself would become one of the Lakes' greatest tourist attractions.

Wordsworth's great-great-great-great grandson still owns Rydal Mount,

the house where the poet lived and died.

Well, I think he was sort of partly a poet, liking to be a recluse,

but partly wanted the public acclaim.

So you have this slight balance.

He had, on average, 600 people a year coming through the house.

And these people would have been well-to-do people.

It's a bit of a struggle to get here, you're actually making a slight pilgrimage,

you're coming to see a great poet.

And that is a wonderful thing, he would have loved that,

because he could have gone off into the hills and read his poetry,

they could have come here, been given refreshment by his wife

and his daughter and his sister, and the other women of the house,

and then he could have come in and held court temporarily

and then out he goes. And that would have played up to his ego.

Because towards the end of his life, he undoubtedly had an ego.

By the time the railways had expanded, more people were coming to the area,

do you think that Wordsworth was part of a bygone age?

The railways opened here in 1840s and he died in 1850,

so he was right at the end of his life.

The Industrial Age was coming, there was no getting away from that.

And, therefore, you know, his age was coming to an end

and the new age was starting.

Having said that, he wrote a very famous, which he actually was very fond of,

his Guide To The Lakes, which, ironically,

was encouraging people to come to the Lake District.

And therefore, he had this slight paradox of,

"I've written this book, people should come to the Lakes,

"and yet they're all going to come up and ruin the Lakes".

So it was a slight double-edged sword.

To be fair, Wordsworth wasn't the only one who was nervous

about the impact of the railways.

The passengers themselves often questioned the wisdom

of travelling by train.

It took a bit of courage to go on your first train,

because it must have been a very mysterious experience.

Here was this engine, which somehow generated the power

to pull along maybe a dozen carriages.

How did it work? How did it get its power?

And would it explode?

Which was something that did happen occasionally.

Excursion trains were slightly more prone to accidents

than regular trains.

That's because they tended to be longer,

they were running at irregular times,

sometimes signallers kind of forgot about them.

They often used older rolling stock.

So they had more than their fair share of serious accidents.

So there was a little bit of trepidation

about taking this new mechanical way of getting around.

But most people managed to set their fears aside and take the plunge

because of the advantages that the railways offered.

The 1851 Chester Cup was a great success,

but the day was marred with tragedy.

Returning home from the race meeting, nine people were killed

when excursion trains crashed in a tunnel between here and Manchester.

By June 1851, the Bolton Chronicle had had enough.

"Each week now brings its batch of railway disasters

"as regularly as the world turns around.

"Accidents are not to be waited for, but prevented.

"And to delay improvements

"is neglect criminal in fact, if not in law."

Despite the concerns over safety,

that very same year would also see millions of people

take advantage of the railways to travel to the great metropolis.

Many for the first time in their lives.

As well as opening up isolated parts of the country,

the railways placed the capital

within much easier reach of the general public.

And this would make all the difference when the Great Exhibition opened in London.

The Exhibition was a brainwave of Victoria's husband, Prince Albert.

It was conceived as a grand display

of the wonders of industry from around the world

and was to be temporarily sited in London's Hyde Park

in a glass structure nicknamed the Crystal Palace.

Pictured here in later years,

the Palace was designed by Sir Joseph Paxton,

a director of the Midland Railway.

And it was the trains that brought the crowds.

An average of 40,000 a day.

Six million over a six-month period.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a real watershed

for leisure mobility for ordinary people.

But the Great Exhibition was important in other ways, as well.

For many people, it was the first time they'd seen huge crowds

of ordinary people in great numbers.

And, of course, the 1840s was a time when there were great worries

about Chartism, about riots, about crowd unrest.

So the working classes had a bit of a reputation.

And people were actually quite genuinely worried

that if there was a big crowd of ordinary people

that they would somehow cause a riot.

And for the first time, the commentators said,

"Well, actually, these people are quite well-behaved."

So it was, again, a watershed for perceptions

of the working class in great numbers.

-MEDIA BROADCAST:

-The signal was given.

And 1,000 tonnes of steel and glass came hurtling to the ground.

The Crystal Palace came to a fiery and indeed explosive end.

But it ushered in a new era for London

as an excursion destination for people up and down the country.

According to The Times, "30 years ago,

"not one countryman in 100 had seen the metropolis.

"Now there is scarcely one in the same number

"who has not spent a day there."

The passing of the Bank Holidays Act in 1871

helped to develop the idea of the weekend short break

and created more opportunities for special excursion trains.

By the turn of the century,

resort towns like Blackpool were really hitting their glory days.

A popularity that would continue well into modern times.

-MEDIA BROADCAST:

-Yes, you'll feel you're really on top of the world.

How can you be down in the dumps

when your heart's up in the clouds

and you can throw away cares to the four winds?

This is the height of happiness.

But these huge numbers of holiday-makers

would simply not have been possible without the railways.

Not only as a mass form of transport,

but also as a force for social change.

It wasn't true that Blackpool only started when the railway came.

But certainly in 1846, when the branch line reached Blackpool,

it heralded an awful lot of visitors

and meant that there were very soon changes to Blackpool.

They laid out streets and walks,

they developed hotels, lodgings,

churches, gasworks, water supplies.

So it made a tremendous difference to the infrastructure in Blackpool.

As the Edwardian era dawned, marketing of seaside towns

reached new levels of sophistication.

The National Railway Museum in York

has an extensive collection of railway posters

featuring resort towns from up and down the British coast.

By the end of the 19th century, the railway companies began to use colour lithography.

And they had much better illustrations.

Sometimes they would be made by the publishers,

but increasingly, they began to use artists

to actually create their posters for them.

The advertising is quite aspirational.

The pictures are quite carefully selected, they're telling the story.

So if you look at the posters for Fleetwood, for example,

in the 1930s, they're advertising the Marine Hall and the Lido.

-It's really something to look forward to, isn't it?

-Yeah.

You spend all your year working.

Yeah. And, of course, these appeared in railway stations.

With a lot of steam trains in and out, railway stations could look grimy,

and often quite sombre colours.

And you've got really vibrant posters

carefully positioned to catch the eye.

So, this is really advertising as a profession, isn't it?

Poster advertising had been around for some time,

but railway companies began to take it really seriously.

And they had people whose job it was specifically

to grab customers and get them to travel by rail.

Railways made all kinds of outdoor activities

and recreational trips possible.

From cycling and rambling to angling and golf.

The railways transformed the world of sport,

making countrywide competitions possible

and driving the formation of national sporting leagues.

This is the Sir Alex Ferguson stand.

'Graham Simmonds works for the Manchester United Museum

'and has supported the club all his life.'

It all began around about 1878,

when a group of engineers and coach-builders

who worked for Newton Heath railway depot,

they wanted to form a football club.

And so they went to their employer

to ask for their help, which they agreed to.

And from that, the team was known as Newton Heath Lancashire

and Yorkshire Railway Cricket and Football Club.

When this film was shot in 1902,

the club had just changed its name.

Playing here in the slightly darker tops,

they were now known as Manchester United.

-MEDIA BROADCAST:

-The old Newton Heath club of 1902 now seen rushing to say, "How-do?"

It was the railways which had allowed clubs up and down the country to grow.

Not least because it meant that supporters could now travel

far and wide for away matches.

From humble beginnings to a group of railway workers

that worked hard all week

and then they played football on a Saturday afternoon

as a form of leisure, as a form of escape,

with the help of the railways,

we've grown into a national and global football club.

TRAIN WHISTLE

From prize-fights to football

and temperance meetings to beach breaks,

the railways changed how Britons came to see and experience leisure.

Nowadays, our habits have changed.

Many of us own our own cars and we're just as likely

to sun ourselves on the Costa del Sol as we are in Scarborough.

But it's amazing to think how many of the leisure opportunities we now enjoy

were first made possible by the railways.

By collapsing space and time, these thundering beasts

helped us connect as a nation in all kinds of unexpected ways.

And today, well, it's fitting that all across the country,

there are restored heritage railways where people come for a day out

to experience the wonders of steam power

nearly 200 years after their transformation

of our national culture and sense of identity.

That's quite a tribute.